The seasons are changing – more hours of daylight, warmer days, bees buzzing, flowers blooming, more pollen (sneeze!), and even the sound of thunder. Spring is the season of new beginnings. And so is Easter.
Easter celebrates the ultimate new beginning – Jesus is raised from the dead and life is never the same again – for him, his disciples, or for us.
But it didn’t seem that way to those who witnessed Jesus’ crucifixion on Good Friday, or those who ate the Last Supper with Jesus on Maundy Thursday.
Life is like that. Like Jesus and his disciples, we experience days like Palm Sunday when everything goes right and everybody knows it, and it is easy to feel like you are on top of the world.
We also experience our own poignant Maundy Thursday like moments, times when we gather with friends and family, realizing that life is changing, and sensing the coming loss of things we love and remember. Like Jesus we know what it is like to pray for deliverance. And we too witness and experience betrayal, unfair judgment, suffering, and even death, as Jesus and his disciples did during Holy Week.
And amazingly, from time to time, we also experience our own versions of Easter morning, times when our worst fears do not happen, when despair is lifted, and sorrow turns to unexpected joy.
Holy Week is a reminder that God knows our experience of life because God has lived it in the person of Jesus. It is also a reminder that the promise and possibility for new life is always present because of what God has done for us in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.
This is the Easter message, and it is offered afresh to us each year. Whatever our endings, there is always a new beginning. Life does not remain the same. Winter changes to spring.
The days of our lives hold challenges, but each morning a new day dawns. The message of Easter is that Christ is a part of our endings and our beginnings, our challenges and our successes, our hopes and our dreams.
May the blessings of the Easter season be yours, Dent.